


The Only Cure

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Trolls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 14:38:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4023631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just how far should they go in search of a cure for the Rash? Siv Västerström never really thought much about it, but events one night make her wonder whether it’s worth it after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Cure

_The day they cured the Rash was, as it always was, the best day of Siv Västerström’s life.  
_

_She dashed madly through the streets of Mora, whooping and cheering and hugging random passers-by. Shoppers and pedestrians scrambled to get out of the way of this crazy lady in a lab coat. Carriages swerved to avoid her as she sprinted across the roads with no thought of her own safety. A chorus of insults and abuse followed in her wake as people readjusted their clothes or bent to pick up things she had knocked out of their arms, but she paid them no attention. They’d all hear the news soon! They’d be shouting it from the radio towers within the hour, and then they’d be lining up to shake her hand!  
_

_A cure, a cure, it was almost impossible to believe! But she had seen the results and scanned the data and she knew there had been no misinterpretation or mistake. That knowledge, that certainty that they had finally succeeded and the world was at last on the road to recovery, propelled her on down side streets and past houses, through districts of the city she had never even been to before.  
_

_Eventually, after a few victory laps around the town square, she arrived almost by accident outside her own front gate. She sprinted up the steps just as the door was opening to reveal Torbjörn, not at work for some reason but she couldn’t care less right now. He looked at her as she skidded to a halt in front of him, eyes wide and hope on his face. “Siv?” he asked. “I heard… on the radio… is it true that you’ve-?”  
_

_That was as far as he got before she threw her arms around him and hugged him as tight as she could and before she knew it she was kissing him, not the chaste pecks on the cheek they had grown accustomed to exchanging these days but a deep kiss like when they were both teenagers, and when she finally surfaced for air he smiled that awkward smile she had fallen in love with all those years ago and she felt so sad because, deep down, she knew in her heart that-  
_

-it was time to wake up. 

As it always was. 

She groaned and opened her eyes, looking blearily around. The familiar contours of her research lab slowly coalesced around her. She reached up to rub her eyes and her hands hit something hard and transparent in front of her face. Blinking in surprise, she tried to focus on this strange obstruction before realising it was the faceplate of her hazmat suit. She gave a noise that was halfway between a sigh and a snort of laughter. Falling asleep in full-body hazmat gear – that was a new one. She must have been more tired than she thought she was. 

She tried to remember what she had been dreaming about but the images were fading fast, like patterns on the beach when the tide comes in. Something… to do with her work? And Torbjörn? She remembered feeling happy for the first time in a long time and… Oh, what was the use? She sighed miserably and her respirator mask warped the noise into an angry hiss. 

Slowly, still slightly clumsy in her suit even after a decade of working in it, she stood up from the chair she’d been slumped in and walked across the lab to get a decent view of the clock on the wall. The hands read half past ten. She scowled up at them and went back towards her desk, muttering to herself. If the results hadn’t come back by now, she decided, then she was going to call it a night and go home. Torbjörn was probably wondering where on earth she was. 

Faintly, through the material of the suit, she thought heard the sound of dripping water. 

Siv swore quietly. _Fantastic_ , she thought, wearily. She cocked one ear and listened more carefully. 

_Tap… tap… tap…  
_

That was dripping water alright. She turned and marched down the length of the laboratory towards the sinks at the far end. If they were leaking, then half the labs would have to get shut down before maintenance was allowed in to take a look at them – when you dealt with substances as hazardous as the ones she did, some pretty strict protocols had to be observed. As she moved past the specimen tanks she took subconscious care not to look at what floated inside them. She still remembered when she had first clapped eyes on them, all those years ago…

 

* * *

  

_It was a cold winter’s morning in Mora, not that you’d know inside the hermetically sealed lab. Siv Västerström – Dr Siv Västerström now, PhD and all, 26 years old and fresh out of the University of Mora – leaned forward and gazed into the tank, taking care to keep her expression interested but neutral. A pair of ruined eyes looked back out at her, staring sightlessly out through a layer of Perspex thicker than her thumb.  
_

_“Ugly bastards, aren’t they?” a jovial voice boomed behind her. “This the first time you’ve seen a real one?”  
_

_She straightened up, the brand-new rubber of her hazmat gear creaking quietly. The man who had spoken was looking at her with a grin splitting his fat face wide open, as if he was unaccountably proud of the monstrosities he kept lying around in his laboratory.  
_

_“No, Dr Nylund, I’m afraid it’s not. I had the good fortune to see one of Professor Stendhal’s dissections during my studies at the university here in Mora,” she replied icily. Her new co-workers had warned her about Nylund’s little initiation ritual: show the new researchers the trolls on their first day and take bets with the senior staff to see how many of them scream. She had taken an instant dislike to the corpulent Chief Research Officer when she had first met him, and looked forward to losing him his bet.  
_

_Nylund looked a little bit crestfallen. “Ah, old Fredric’s famous dissections!” he cried, trying to cover up his disappointment. Siv wagered he’d had a few kronor riding on her jumping on a chair and screaming like she was from an old-world sitcom. She supressed a scowl. “They’re quite something, aren’t they?” Nylund continued. “Of course, they’re not quite in the same league as what we do here, but…” He left the sentence hanging, clearly hoping Siv would ask him the obvious question.  
_

_Siv meanwhile had suddenly been struck by how much the fat old man looked like a melting snowman in his white hazmat gear. She turned back to the specimen tanks to hide her face and tried desperately not to dissolve into giggles. Trying to take her mind off the image of Dr Nylund with a carrot for his nose and coal in his mouth, she inspected the labels stuck to the side of each of the five tanks.  
_

_Each specimen had its own printed ID number, beneath which someone had scrawled a name in biro. “Agnetha… Björn… Beni… Anni-Frid,” she read aloud. “And Oskar. Nice.” She turned back to Nylund. “You gave them names?”  
_

_Nylund shrugged and spread his hands. “Well, they roll of the tongue better than Specimen 02457, don’t they? Oh, and Oskar is actually that one’s name,” he countered, jabbing a gloved finger at the tank on the far right. “The other four were captured by the cleansers over the years, but Oskar here wasn’t so much captured as… brought in.” He grinned again. “Dr Västerström, meet Cleanser Private Oskar Ahlberg – or what’s left of him at any rate.”  
_

_Siv got the sudden urge to punch Nylund in his faceplate. She got as far as clenching her fist before getting herself under control. “Well,” she said as levelly as she could manage, “I suppose it must be some small comfort that his death won’t be meaningless.”  
_

_Nylund’s grin became somewhat predatory. Siv looked at him, not sure what grisly bombshell the old man was planning on dropping next and not eager to find out.  
_

_“Death?” he asked, mock-innocently.  
_

_Siv blinked. “I mean, at least we can use tissue from his corpse in our research,” she replied, gesturing at the abomination in the tank next to her.  
_

_Nylund laughed, a deep guffaw. “My dear girl, surely you know that dead tissue is no use to us? We can’t test a cure on lifeless flesh! Didn’t they teach you anything over in the university?”  
_

_Siv ignored the words ‘my dear girl’ with no small amount of effort. “Well I assume you must have found some use for his body, or else why would you have it cluttering… up… the lab...” she slowed and trailed off, the horrible implication of Nylund’s words dawning on her.  
_

_She would later learn that Nylund actually made_ two _bets with the senior staff: whether the new staff would scream when they saw the trolls, and whether they would pale when he told them what he was about to tell Siv.  
_

_“Dr Västerström, Oskar – along with all the others – is quite alive. Heavily sedated, and sealed behind bulletproof glass just to be safe, but alive nonetheless. How else did you think we get our hands on the necessary samples? Ask the Cleansers pretty-please?” Nylund chuckled. “No, my dear: these five are just as much members of staff as you and I.”  
_

_Siv went pale._

_  
_

* * *

 

 She was still faintly disgusted with herself for how quickly she had gotten used to having five live trolls propped up along one side of the laboratory. In her first few days she’d harboured elaborate fantasies of blowing the whole affair wide open, of marching into the offices of the _Mora Tidning_ with pictures and reports and starting a public outcry. But as the days had rolled into weeks and the weeks became months, she’d come to accept the practice for what it was – an awful necessity. So what if five have to be kept in endless torment? Weighed against the potential of a cure, five was nothing. 

_Tap… tap… tap…  
_

If it was a water leak, she thought as she bent down and yanked the cupboard doors under the sink open, then that really would be the perfect end to the day. Two failed samples, and now this. She muttered something vaguely obscene under her breath and bent down to have a look. 

The space under the sink was bone dry. 

_Tap… tap… taptap…  
_

She frowned. If the pipe wasn’t leaking here, then where? 

_Tap…  
_

She twisted her head round, trying to work out where the sound was coming from. It was difficult to tell in her thick hazmat suit which muffled and slightly distorted any sound passing through it. Now it seemed to be coming from behind her. Was the leak further back up the labs? And, now she listened more closely, she realised that it didn’t really sound like the sharp sound of water on porcelain. It was softer, quieter, more organic. 

Like bone on glass. 

_Taptaptap…  
_

Fear, bright and hot, burned up her spine. She jumped to her feet and span round, her eyes going wide behind her faceplate and her breath coming in hoarse rasps through her respirator. She looked in panic down the lab to where the five specimen tanks stood, thick glass cylinders half-buried in shadow. Inside the rightmost tank, something was moving. 

Siv’s first instinct was to run, to flee headlong down the length of the lab and into the decontamination chamber at the far end. There was a button there she could press that would lock the whole laboratory down and seal it off behind ten centimetre thick steel shutters. Lab security would be there within thirty seconds when they heard the siren – a peculiar electronic whoop that was reserved for biohazard emergencies and which every employee prayed they never had to hear – and they’d be armed with flamethrowers and rifles. She could make it. She’d be safe. It was what any sensible person would do. 

Siv never really worked out why she didn’t. 

Instead, she slowly crept over to tanks. Perhaps she was confident that the glass would hold. It was supposed to be bulletproof, after all. Reaching out, she flicked a switch on the wall next to the rightmost tank. Above it, a small halogen bulb flared into life and washed the tank in a cold white light. 

The troll inside shuddered and squinted against the harsh glare. It tried to raise its broken, deformed hands to shield its eyes but the confines of the tank were too small. It fidgeted awkwardly, trying to hide its face from the light like it was almost ashamed of what it had become. 

“Hello, Oskar,” Siv whispered. 

She could see immediately what had happened. The previous morning, they had changed out the sedative pumps that kept the trolls unconscious. It was a complicated procedure involving a lot of interconnected pipes and valves, and someone had clearly forgotten to turn the valve connecting Oskar’s tank back to its ‘on’ position. There would have been enough sedative coursing round the troll’s tattered circulatory system to keep it under for about 36 hours, but after that… 

The troll slowly raised its head, eyes half-closed against the light. One of its eyelids was just a ragged thread of skin that flickered up and down, no use at all. It gazed out at Siv through the nutrient gel and the armoured glass and Siv saw nothing but confusion and fear in its eyes. 

Siv reached up to the tangle of glass pipes and plastic tubes that lead from the vials of sedative to the top of the troll’s tank. She gripped the valve tightly – the old pre-Rash glassware liked nothing better than to stick to itself, making every job twice as hard as it needed to be – and looked sadly back the troll, when a thought occurred to her. 

A quarter turn of the valve would open it just enough to put the troll back under. But a half turn, opening the valve fully, would flood the tank. Troll biology was in many ways no different to that of the people they’d once been – an overdose would kill it stone dead like it would a human, put an end to this awful mockery of existence it had been cursed with. Surely that would be the right thing to do? 

But then they’d have one less sample source, and the lab was desperate for new tissue. The Cleansers had long since started to ‘forget’ to capture live specimens after that debacle outside the ruins of Kvarnberg where they’d lost half a platoon. Their lab was one of the few left with enough equipment and resources to make any headway on a cure. They _needed_ every last scrap they could get. 

Inside the tank the troll flicked its eyes up to where her hand rested, and then back to her. The shreds of its face shifted slightly and its jaw trembled. It looked almost like it was trying to speak. Siv didn’t want to think about what it might be trying to say. 

She paused for a moment, torn between her duty to humanity and her duty as a human. 

Then she turned the valve a quarter turn. 

“I’m sorry,” she murmured as the troll’s eyes slowly closed, its last motion one last plaintive _tap_ on the glass walls of its prison. 

* * *

  

When she finally got home that night the town hall’s clock was striking midnight and Torbjörn was about ready to call the police and report her missing. She had walked in, not said a word to him, and collapsed on the sofa in the living room with her head in her hands. 

“Bad day at work,” was all she could find the energy to mumble to him as he hovered in the doorway and nervously asked how she was. He nodded, seeming to understand, and left. 

He came back a few minutes later with two glasses – wedding gifts from his father, Siv remembered dimly – and a bottle full of a clear golden liquid with an odd-looking bird etched into the glass. He unscrewed the top and poured a centimetre or two into both glasses before pushing one across the table towards her. 

Siv frowned and looked up at him. “Weren’t we supposed to be saving this for Emil’s passing-out ceremony?” she asked. “My day was awful, yeah, but this seems a bit… much. I mean, it’s not like anyone _died_ over there-”. She paused, her mind going back to what she’d done, and she fought to supress a burst of sarcastic, self-loathing laughter. 

Torbjörn just beamed at her. “Think of it as a celebration,” he said. 

“Of what?” she asked warily. Torbjörn had one of his _I’ve-got-a-cunning-plan_ expressions on him again. 

“Of our return to glory, of course!” he grinned. “I had a brilliant idea at work today, Siv, and I think you’re going to love it. It’s so brilliant I quit this evening, so I can spend all my time working on it!” 

Siv nearly choked on her whiskey. “ _You quit!?_ ” she gasped as the alcohol burned her throat. “Jesus Christ, Torbjörn!” It was an old-world curse her mother had taught her. “What are we doing drinking this stuff then? We’d be better off selling it! You know we can’t support ourselves on my salary alone!” She made to pour the rest of the whiskey back into the bottle. 

“Siv. _Siv_.” Torbjörn smiled at her, ignoring her little outburst. “Before you get too worked up, just answer me this: how much do you think a book costs? An original, old world book?” 

Siv admitted she didn’t know. He told her, and then she finished her drink. 

Torbjörn spent the next fifteen minutes outlining his crazy plan. Siv barely listened. The way she saw it, she had two options: she could join her husband on this mad scheme, or she could go back to work tomorrow and try to walk past those tanks like there was nothing in them for the rest of her life. 

She set her glass down carefully. Across the table Torbjörn looked eagerly at her, quietly hoping that his wife wouldn’t shoot this idea down like she had done with all his other get-rich-quick schemes. 

“Count me in,” she said.


End file.
